Midnight in Berlin

by James MacManus

  There was a silence. This was not what the ambassador wanted to hear. The German question was the major diplomatic issue for the government in London. Reaction to the alarming speed of events in Berlin had been based on the carefully calibrated diplomacy of reason and persuasion. The one unalterable fact that coloured the thinking of every politician in Britain and France, and indeed elsewhere in Europe, was that a return to the carnage of 1914–18 must at all costs be avoided.

  It was widely known that public opinion in Germany and that of the business community were of the same frame of mind. The wounds of the war were still fresh in a country that had suffered a disproportionate number of casualties. The German High Command was also known to be against any military adventures.

  Given these facts, it was beyond belief or rational construction to suppose that the German Führer would actually want a new war. He himself had served in the trenches and lost many friends there, whom he still publicly alluded to as heroes.

  And yet now the ambassador’s new military attaché, a man he hardly knew, was telling him that Hitler was about to unleash a sweeping purge of the army command and take control of the army himself, thus removing any threat from the one power base that could check his military ambition.

  “If this happens,” said Sir Nevile, “and you will forgive me for saying that I have my doubts, but let’s assume you are right, if this happens, what are we to make of it?”

  “The army is being placed on a war footing. Hitler intends to go to war sooner rather than later. There will be nothing to stop him if he gets away with this.”

  “We lost almost a million men in the last war. Germany and France lost over three million between them. Go onto the streets of London, Berlin or Paris and ask people whether they want another war.”

  “Is that the point, Sir Nevile?”

  The ambassador rotated his glass, staring at the swirl of peat-brown whisky. It was precisely the point, he thought.

  “Thank you. I will consider this information,” he said.

  Macrae leant forward. “I suggest we urge the foreign secretary to make the case in cabinet for the strongest possible message to be sent to the chancellor.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “The prime minister must agree to conscription and we must accelerate our rearmament programme. We must arrange joint manoeuvres with the French: show Hitler the mailed fist.”

  Sir Nevile Henderson got to his feet, putting his glass down hard on the table.

  “You arrived in this country a matter of days ago, Colonel. With respect, you know nothing of the psychology of the man we are dealing with, nor the thinking of his inner circle. The German chancellor can be susceptible to reason and logic. He can also become irrational, over-excited and prone to lash out, if threatened. Trust me: the mailed fist will just make matters worse. I know the man.”

  3

  Joachim Bonner placed the cup of coffee on his desk, sat down, lit a cigarette, looked at his watch and picked up the top file from his in-tray. It was 8.38 a.m. His day always started like this. A stack of files, each with a small note attached. The notes were all signed in tiny script with just two initials and the date written in roman numerals. He squinted at the first file: “RH IX.I.VIII.” Typical arrogance from a man who had been brought up as a pious Catholic and educated at the finest private school in Bavaria. And Reinhard Heydrich never let his staff forget it, thought Joachim. Why couldn’t he just write “09/01/1938” like everyone else?

  He examined the file: William L. Shirer of the Columbia Broadcasting System. He glanced at the next one: Ian Colvin of the News Chronicle, London. He flipped through the others. All were new arrivals in the foreign press corps, mostly English-speaking, but there were Spanish, Portuguese and Italian journalists as well.

  Bonner lit another cigarette. It was a complete waste of time using surveillance on the foreign press. They were always to be found at the Adlon bar; if not, there were one or two restaurants where they gathered like sheep, ate, drank and then argued over who would pay what share of the bill. Their rooms were bugged anyway, so what was the point, except perhaps to marvel at how they managed to get up in the morning, given the money they spent at the bar the night before.

  He was about to replace the pile when he caught sight of the final file: Colonel Noel Macrae, military attaché at the British embassy. A Christmas baby, thought Bonner, and he opened the file to check the date. That’s right: born 25 December 1890, Inverkeithing, Scotland.

  Macrae had just arrived in the Berlin diplomatic corps and would already be under the usual surveillance. That, thought Bonner, is what my job amounts to. At the age of forty-four, after twenty years’ hard work in the police, he was in charge of surveillance, occasional bribery and, more rarely still, entrapment, of members of the foreign community in Berlin: bankers, arms dealers, the occasional church dignitary and, incredibly, tourists, who came to enjoy the dark allure of the Third Reich. Not much reward for a brilliant war service and the Iron Cross 1st Class that went with it. After the humiliation of Versailles, Bonner had been an early member of paramilitary groups such as the Freikorps, which sprouted like mushrooms from the dank earth of shame and betrayal. That was a lot more than you could say for Reinhard Heydrich.

  He lit another cigarette and indulged in a favourite pastime, reminding himself of how the official account of his superior’s career differed somewhat from the actual version. Reinhard Heydrich headed the Sicherheitspolizei and Sicherheitsdienst, two agencies combined to form the Gestapo. Heydrich, who had been too young to fight in the war and who had spurned the chance to join any of the revolutionary movements against an imposed peace deal and the corrupt Weimar Republic that followed. Heydrich, who hadn’t been able to hold down a job until he went into the navy, and guess what happened then.

  Bonner smiled and lit another cigarette. He enjoyed recalling this moment in Heydrich’s now sanitised past. The man who currently controlled the political, criminal and border police in Germany had been kicked out of the navy because of his betrayal of a woman to whom he had been engaged. And he would have got away with it if he had not been so arrogant at the court martial.

  Then, through marriage to that ghastly woman Lina, Heydrich had somehow engineered an introduction to Himmler, who had given him the job of creating a security police force. That was six years ago, and now Heydrich was one of the most important and feared men in the Reich. And I, Joachim Bonner, work for him. Unofficially I am his number two, but Heydrich refuses to create such a title and instead demeans me with oversight of surveillance duties.

  Bonner knew what the files meant. Entrapment was the method used to discredit those diplomats deemed to be irrationally hostile to the Reich. One did not expect foreigners to kneel down and embrace the creed of National Socialism, but one looked for respect and professionalism. Thus diplomats and members of the wider foreign community who were considered to be actively critical were given the special attention of his department.

  He pressed the intercom buzzer and called his secretary, a broad-beamed lump of a girl from the farmland of Bavaria. She came in, leaving the door open as usual. Hilde may not have been much of a looker but she had the one attribute required of every man and woman who worked in the building. She was a true believer, loyal and trustworthy. Her family were all party members from a village outside Munich. Like everyone else in the building, her personal file carried the names and addresses of her immediate family and those of her uncles, aunts and even cousins. Everyone knew why that information was so carefully recorded.

  Hilde was not just loyal; she was ambitious. Behind those thick-lensed glasses lay a sharp mind. She wanted promotion into a real executive role. Joachim appreciated that.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Call Frau Schmidt at the Salon and tell her I will be coming over at noon.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He picked up the file on Macrae.

  “Send this downstairs and say I want a decent photo, fu
ll face.”

  A sudden scream rent the air, a terrible sound of pain and anguish, followed by a second almost more terrible strangulated gargling of someone trying to shout “No!” but dragging the word out as if in recognition not just of imminent death but of a wider horror that would be visited on family and friends.

  Bonner got up and closed the door. That was the trouble with having an office on the fourth floor. The view across the tree-lined Prinz-Albrechtstrasse was pleasant, especially in spring, but extra interrogation rooms had been built in the attic to complement those in the basement. Those rooms were directly above them and sometimes the interrogation teams did not close the soundproof doors properly. He would have to speak to someone about it.

  Hilde picked up his cup.

  “Of course,” she said. “More coffee?”

  The Salon occupied a house on the corner of a block of shops and businesses in the residential area of Charlottenburg, a quiet upper-class district that housed many foreign diplomats and their families. The ground floor had been altered to suggest a smart bar or restaurant, although there was no name above the entrance and the windows were heavily curtained.

  Visitors were received at the door by a middle-aged woman wearing a tight-fitting full-length grey woollen coat, buttoned at the neck. The woman greeted Bonner with a nod of recognition and opened the door, showing him into a vestibule. Once the outer door had been closed, the curtains of the vestibule were pulled back by unseen hands to reveal a large room laid out as a restaurant dining room. A marble-topped counter ran the length of the back wall. There was a mirror behind the bar, above which fairy lights had been strung in swooping beads of light. Otherwise, the room was lit only by the red-shaded lamps on each table. A fanlight above a door at one end revealed a pink ceiling in the adjoining room.

  Kitty Schmidt was waiting for Bonner at the bar, smoking and drinking coffee. She had aged in the two years since he had first met her. He had thought her quite glamorous then, in a dyed-blonde, big-bosomed sort of way. She had the commanding charm of a woman who had run the most famous brothel in Berlin in the late twenties. Kitty Schmidt certainly had secrets, and they interested the newly formed Gestapo in 1934. They had made her what Bonner thought was a very reasonable offer: cooperate with us and continue to run the brothel – and keep the money, or most of it anyway. The cooperation meant closure for a month while cameras and tape recorders were concealed in all the rooms.

  This was a genuine offer, but Kitty Schmidt had not seen it that way. She had closed the Salon, paid off the girls and tried to escape. They had picked her up at the Dutch border six months later and brought her back to Berlin. Bonner had personally conducted the interrogation in the basement. He’d stripped her and slapped her around a bit – to remind her where she was – and then made a rather different offer. Schmidt would reopen the Salon, but she would be given new girls hand-picked for the work. She would hand the profits over and be paid a weekly wage.

  Kitty Schmidt had no choice but to agree. They had found her mother living in Hanover and a brother working in the Krupp armaments factory in Essen. It was a reserved occupation, but they conscripted him anyway just to make the point. And so the Salon started back in business. Bonner had personally chosen the girls, mostly from Munich, and to his irritation but not his surprise, Reinhard Heydrich had taken a keen interest in the procedure.

  That is where Bonner had to admit his boss showed a flair for creative risk that amounted to genius. He despised Heydrich, and not just because he was an arriviste who had joined the party only when it had become successful. Like all such people, he had had to prove himself more Nazi than anyone else. Heydrich was cold, calculating, with the high intelligence of a well-educated man. He did not try to conceal his ambition, which seemed to gnaw away at him like cancer. He had a talent for spotting and exploiting the weakness in others, especially his colleagues in the Nazi Party.

  What Bonner despised was the way in which Heydrich operated. There was a political calculation to his cruelty. It was almost as if the man had decided to promote himself in the party hierarchy by becoming more monstrous, more violently sadistic, than those around him. He had certainly succeeded. He was feared as much by those in power as by the Reich’s many enemies. Even Himmler, the overall director of the Gestapo, was said to be wary of the protégé whom he had done so much to promote since they were introduced in 1932.

  Above all, Bonner despised his superior officer because Heydrich had allowed personal ambition to corrupt the working practice of a secret policeman. It was not enough to trap the insects, as Heydrich termed his enemies; he had to pull their legs off as well. He was a psychopath whose pleasure in savagery was counterproductive and also ran against the grain of good secret-police practice. The most valuable weapon in the Gestapo’s armoury, the priceless commodity that underpinned every secret operation, was solid, irrefutable information. As Bonner well knew, you don’t get reliable information from those you torture to death.

  He paused in front of Schmidt, raised his right arm and said, “Heil Hitler.”

  She smiled, raised the palm of her hand to him by way of reply and said, “Guten Morgen.”

  Bonner sat down and scowled. He had never been able to make this woman respond properly to the Hitlergruss. She did so, of course, when Heydrich came, because he terrified everyone. But somehow Bonner did not inspire the same fear.

  “Coffee?” said Schmidt.

  Bonner yawned. “Yes. Is Sara in?”

  Schmidt nodded and reached over the bar and under the counter, pressing a hidden button. Seconds later, the door at the far end opened and a tall, dark-haired young woman walked in. She was wearing a tight-fitting, low-cut dress, different in style and colour from that of the woman on the door. She looked tired. He face was pale, the pallor accentuated by black lipstick and nail varnish. Her eyes were dark pools under long lashes. She had been working there for over a year and must be about twenty-three years old by now, thought Bonner.

  “Tea?” he said to her.

  The woman nodded, lit a cigarette, sat on a bar stool and stared ahead into the mirror. Bonner looked at her profile next to him and then at her reflection in the mirror. She had the moody look of a woman with secret sorrows, yet her eyes were lit with silent laughter. Her face held you, so that if you turned away for fear of being caught staring, you immediately wanted to turn back again.

  She was Heydrich’s masterstroke, an act so brazen that Bonner could still scarcely credit his boss with the nerve to take such a risk.

  Sara was Jewish. Her real name was Ruth Sternschein, but the Nazis forced all Jews to take first names that denoted their racial origin. The women were all made to take the first name “Sara” and the men “Israel”. The names were stamped on their identity papers. So Ruth became Sara. She was the eldest child of a family of doctors in Hamburg. She’d been well educated and was studying law at university when her life ended. That was how she described it. She was twenty-two years old and her life didn’t just change, it ended.

  The reason was simple. The head of the Gestapo had decided that a Jewish girl would become the lead attraction in his Berlin brothel. Here, senior party members, army officers and foreign visitors dallied by night. Here, their every intimate move was photographed and recorded. Every one of the rooms, including the small swimming pool in the basement, had been wired for sound and film. These men were not just caught indulging in sexual excesses that defied imagination – they were in many cases caught doing so with a Jewish woman.

  At a time when the mere suggestion of Jewish ancestry would bring shame and expulsion on any member of the Nazi Party or senior member of the military, such illicit liaisons gave Reinhard Heydrich extraordinary power over those caught in the web. Heydrich himself would bring senior colleagues to the Salon for an evening’s amusement. Those he wished to entrap and blackmail would be introduced to Sara. Sometimes no more than drink and some exceptionally good food were served, but on most occasions the guests slipped thr
ough the fanlight door and found a comfortable sitting room, where the girls on duty that night would be sipping tea, smoking and reading magazines.

  A large crystal vase in a round centre table was filled with carnations. The rules were strict. The girls must all wear smart grey dresses as if about to go out for an evening drink or afternoon coffee. They were to have polite conversation with their guests, nothing political but usually harmless chat about the latest film, the weather or the birth of a polar bear cub at the zoo – anything but politics.

  It had been Kitty Schmidt’s idea that her Salon should create the illusion of a small social gathering at which two people who find each other attractive may discreetly, and immediately, indulge their desire. When the establishment had originally opened, sometime around 1927, the police were paid off and the major hotels informed that their wealthier guests would find discretion and entertainment behind the big door at 11 Giesebrechtstrasse. The word spread and soon senior military officers began to knock on the door, then foreign diplomats. As the Salon became well known, the prices went up and Schmidt developed a restaurant to sustain the illusion of a social rather than sexual ambience. When Heydrich took over, he liked the idea and improved it by supplying champagne in what became known as the Pink Room. He hired chefs to make sure the food was the best in Berlin and insisted that the wine and champagne be of the most expensive vintages.

  The Salon’s guests – they were always referred to as guests, never as customers or clients – made their choice by taking a carnation from the vase in the centre table and offering it to whoever had caught their eye. He would then follow the girl down a corridor along which heavy, soundproofed doors gave onto luxurious bedrooms.

  If Sara was in the party room, she almost always became the first choice. She was sometimes allowed to wear a more daring dress than the other girls, usually a red dress in the oriental style with a long side slit. Her dark sultry looks, a full figure with a tight waist and the laughter in those eyes were enough to attract any man. No one suspected her racial origins, because who would expect such a place to employ a Jewess?